Tag: Rover

This is the final post about the rover, I promise. In addition to the changes made to the electronics box, we also needed to get data from the wheels. Each wheel is a self contained unit with a battery, motor, and speed controller, which is sent pwm signals from the mbed. We needed to get the power draw from each wheel and this is the board I designed to do it.

In another episode of clearing up old projects, here’s a controller I made for the rover that acts as an emergency override and also allows somebody nearby to drive it around. The rover is typically controlled over the internet but there are times you may want to be able to control it without the internet, including when the internet connection is down. Any signal from the controller also overrides the signal from the internet user so it can be used as an E-stop.

Last summer I started working with the rover team to modify the rover to be used for another research project. The original rover did extremely well at the competition but they were working under tight time restrictions and almost all of the work was done by undergrads. That meant there was a lot of work needed to fix and modify it.